“Is it always this hot in Oklahoma?” she said.
“In July it is. It usually cools off, though, when the sun goes down.”
She shrugged faintly, as though she didn't believe me. A white pique skirt-and-halter outfit had taken over for the shorts and T shirt, but the effect was about the same. Sitting in front of that cabin, she looked crisp and fresh, as out of place as caviar in an Army mess kit.
“This is quite a place you have here,” she said dryly. “Do you own it?”
“Me and the bank.”
She smiled. It was an expression that came slowly, and you didn't realize that it was there at all until it hit you. Then she stretched those white legs out in front of her and lay back with her elbows on the top step. I must have been staring pretty hard, but she didn't seem to notice.
“Were you ever a fighter?” she asked.
It seemed like a funny question. “I was never a boxer, if that's what you mean.”
“You've got the build for it.”
I didn't know what to say to that. It made me uncomfortable, the way she looked at me, and I wondered if she was laughing at me. About that time I saw Sheldon's Buick turn off the highway and decided it was time I got away from there.
When I got back to the station I saw that Ike had washed down the driveway and swept the office—things I never remembered to do. “If I'm not back by ten o'clock,” I said, “go ahead and lock up.” I left my keys with him, then got into my '47 Chevy and headed for town.
When you take 66 into Creston, your first impression is that it's a pretty good-sized place. The first things you see are the oil-well supply houses, big sprawling buildings and sheds, long rows of powerful cementing trucks, pumpers, testing and drilling equipment. Acres of buildings and acres of trucks, millions of dollars' worth of equipment. It's pretty impressive the first time you see it.
Right next to the railroad are the grain elevators, great towering cement columns standing solid and proud like lonesome skyscrapers in the middle of the prairie. And then there's the big overpass at the railroad. You cross the overpass and drop down on the other side and you're in Creston.
You take one look at the town and feel cheated.
You'd been led to expect great things and here you are right in the middle of another one-horse prairie town. I'd lived here all my life, knocking out four years in the Army, and I never failed to be disappointed when I looked at it. It was a fairly clean town, as prairie towns go, once you moved away from the cluster of produce and feed companies that huddled around the grain elevators. Coming down the town side of the overpass, you could see it all. The straight, treeless streets. The frame houses and parched lawns. The new, raw-looking high school, the cement tennis courts, the white afterthought of a steeple on the Baptist church.
It was my home. A place where eight thousand people, more or less, lived, loved, hated, worshiped, spawned. I knew everybody and everybody knew me, and that's the kind of arrangement you can get pretty sick of after a while.
For a minute I thought I'd drive around to the family house and say hello to my dad, but I stopped at a drive-in instead and had a beer. At that moment, with the bank breathing on my neck, I didn't feel up to lying about how good business was and how much money I was making. And I didn't want Dad asking if Beth Langford and I had set the date yet. He didn't know it, and Beth didn't know it, but there wasn't going to be any date. That's one thing I was sure of.
The carhop, the sister of a guy I had known in high school, brought me the beer.
“How's the tourist business, Joe?”—“Fine. Just fine.”
What a joke! I thought. They always asked the same question and I always gave the same answer, lying in my teeth. But, at times like this, there was always one comforting thought in the back of my mind—this tourist business was purely a temporary arrangement. A breather, a stopover on the way to something big.
If they thought I was going to stay bogged down in Creston the rest of my life, they were crazy. There was a limit to the number of craps a man could throw, no matter how unlucky he was. Sooner or later his luck had to change, and I could feel it in my bones that my turn was about to come up.
I had a theory about this business of getting ahead in the world. Once, at least once, in every man's life there comes a chance to make a killing, a chance to lift himself out of the dung heap. I'd seen it happen too many times. I'd seen oil-field roughnecks become millionaires, betting their hard-earned cash on good structures that the big companies had missed on. I'd seen two-bit land men become big shots overnight.
There is no mystery about how one man gets to be a big shot while the man right beside him remains a bum all his life. One man saw the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when it appeared, recognized it for what it was, grabbed it.
There's no mystery about it at all. The only two requirements are plenty of patience and a world of guts. And this is the way it works:
Herb Carter was a small-time land man for a big-time oil company. His job was to go out and lease up land that the company wanted, land that had been proved either by existing producing wells, or by geophysical exploration—proved at a cost of maybe a million dollars to the company. It happened that Herb had a friend who was the chief engineer for an exploration company, and this was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that Herb didn't miss. From his friend Herb got the exact location of the prize structure and leased the land for himself.
It sounds pretty simple, but it took plenty of guts. Herb Carter had blackballed himself for life, he had practically robbed his company of a million dollars that they had sunk into the exploration of that land. But he took the chance. He let the company scream. He fought off lawyers and began to drill.
Now, there is just one way in God's world to tell you if a structure will produce oil, and that is to sink a hole. They can shoot the land a thousand times and locate faults, salt domes, anticlines, any of which might produce oil, but the only way to tell is to sink a hole. And every time you sink a hole the odds are nine to one that it will be dry. Herb knew this before he started, but he also knew that this was his one chance, his only chance, to hit the top, so he let them scream and he drilled.
It happens that Herb hit it to the tune of five million, and I had heard the story all my life. But the lesson in the story is not that he hit; the lesson is that he had the guts to recognize an opportunity and grab it.
Herb Carter's story was one I never forgot, and its lesson stuck with me. Have patience, have faith, and have the guts when the time comes to act. So when they asked me about the tourist business I could look them in the eye and say: “Fine. Just fine.” Because I knew that one day my turn would come.
I tramped the horn and had the carhop bring me another beer, knowing that I was going to be late, knowing that Beth didn't like the smell of beer on my breath anyway, and not caring somehow. I was thinking about that blonde out at the tourist court.
Now, there is a woman, I thought, that a man could get excited about. If I was on my way to pick up a woman like that, you wouldn't find me killing time in a drive-in. You could bet your life on that!
But habit had its way, finally. I settled the tab with the girl and headed the Chevy toward town.
The Langford place was on Third Street, a one-story white frame house right across from the Methodist church, where Beth and I used to go to Sunday school, and where Beth still did. The house had been standing there ever since I could remember, just like my own family place a block away, and it never seemed to change. It got a fresh coat of white paint every other spring, the hedge was always neatly trimmed, the lawn always mowed.